When thinking about mirror neurons, about 5:45 into the video it talks about how mirror neurons fire when watching sports because when you know the game then your neurons are firing like you were playing. That might explain why I do not have a lot of interest in watching golf or ballet dancing. I don’t play golf or ballet dance so I am guessing I do not have many mirror neurons firing when watching someone else golf or dance. However, I have played a lot of baseball, football, hockey, and basketball and thus when I am watching those games I get deeply involved because I can put myself into the game.
At about 9 minutes in the video it talks about how actors use their expressions to activate mirror neurons and make us connect with the character. It makes me think that the vast majority of entertainment like movies, books, sports, plays, and music are all based on activating our mirror neurons.
This is a very interesting organization called Recording For The Blind and Dyslexic that could help any educator trying to implement UDL in their classrooms.http://www.rfbd.org/
Pretty much with the help of over 5000 volunteers this non profit organizations creates audio versions of everything from classic books to the latest text books to help students who for whatever reason have difficulty reading. Anyone who has a documented print reading disability can access their collection of audio books to download or via CD for free. To anyone interested in donating go here: http://www.rfbd.org/Support-Us/22/
If I am going to someplace or going to do something that I feel nervous about, I have certain odd routines that I have developed in order to assuage my anxiety; for example, lets say I am going to a high stakes interview, I will get to the interview site a half a hour before early and just walk around the block a bunch of times. For some reason this calms me. Professor Rose last night shared that he has his routines in order to deal with the anxiety of teaching. In our society, I believe people think that if people have anxiety about something it must be because they are not good at it or do not have experience doing it. The Prof. Rose example illustrates that even talented people with years of experience can feel anxious about doing something they have done successfully many times before. One way for students to better manage their anxiety, may be to explicitly discuss in class that having anxiety is normal part of being human and that having routines/rituals in order to manage that anxiety is normal as well. I think it would be an interesting assignment to give students to ask them to find someone who is very famous and successful as an actor, athlete, politician, scientist, writer, or any other field and try to find out if they have any routines or rituals that they do to deal with their anxiety. The video below is an example of what I would show to a class. It is of recently retires professional baseball player Nomar Garciaparra. Garciaparra has literally thousands of hours of experience hitting a baseball, yet before each time he tries to hit he goes through an elaborate routine of pulling on his gloves and sleeves, tapping his toes, moving dirt around, and swinging his bat around. He does this exact routine in between every pitch. In his career he saw over 10,000 pitchers which means he did this exact elaborate routine over 10,000 times!
While creating my fist voice thread, most of the time I thought this was interesting but I could do something more elaborate with other programs or websites. For example, in the past I have used Microsoft Movie Maker to create slide shows or videos that feature music or audio voice commentary. I do not have a mac, but know they come with similar types of programs. After creating a video like this, I can upload it to youtube where people can respond to it with text comments or video comments. These programs and websites are a lot more familiar to people than voicethread and I do not believe that voicethread does enough to improve or differentiate what can be done with it enough for people to want to use that over other programs and websites. One of the biggest flaws with voicethread unless I am mistaken is how long the voicethread can be. I could be wrong, but it did not appear that you could create a voice thread that was more than a few slides long. Compared to creating something on Microsoft Movie Maker where one can make it hours long it does not make voicethread look good. Another problem I saw was that you could only create a few voicethreads before you had to start paying for more storage space. The paradigm that has made sites like youtube, facebook, twitter, blogger, and other types of sites that allow people to express themselves so popular is that they are all free. Paying for something like this will turn most people away from staying with voicethread. I believe it would be also a tough sell to get people to be interested in it because it is not easy to describe to people in quick terms which in general hampers the ability for a site to go viral.
What is supposed to be novel about voicethread is the variety of ways one can comment on a voice thread, but the options are not much more elaborate than how one comments on youtube or blogger where you can respond with text, videos, pictures, links and other ways.
I had never heard of UDL until a few months ago; in addition, many educators that I know have never heard of the concept. That is why I am curious as to how often UDL comes up in the news. Here are some recent mentions of UDL:
This is an interesting article about and iPhone app that helps children who can not speak or have other communication problems communicate: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-05-27-iphone-autism_N.htm I think in the future we will see more applications created for commercial products like cell phones that aid in education. We might see a time when teachers are actually encouraging their students to bring cell phones out.
While taking a course in UDL, I have mostly thought about UDL’s principals in relation to the traditional core subjects of school like math and language arts. But, the principals of UDL can be applied to any subject at school. Case in point a women named Sanda Yang has been using UDL to teach music. Here is a video where she talks a little bit what motivated her to use UDL:
What I like about both the video and her website is not only does she discuss how she has used UDL, both the video and website have many UDL principals built in to them such as using the closed captioning feature for youtube which we discussed a couple of classes ago. If you look at her actual website, she uses audio, text, images, video, links, and downloadable materials to explain her UDL music lessons.
The above Yahoo News article discusses a professor in Indiana who is using video game style principals (that happen to also coincide with UDL style principals) like clear goals, quick feedback, and different types of motivational techniques.
As Professor Rose has pointed out, nearly all video games have many UDL elements in how they are made. Too often, I hear politicians and pundits reflexively saying video games are bad or kids should stop playing games. While I agree, a kid sitting around for 10 hours a day playing games and not getting exercise is not ideal, we should also look at how even games that are not specifically published for the education market by companies like Nintendo, Microsoft Sony, Sega, and EA can in many ways be education. In the video below, video game designer and Georgia Teach professor Ian Bogost talks about how his 5 year old son learned fiscal life lessens from a video game.
Personally, I believe I learned a lot from video games over the years and continue to do so. I remember learning my multiplication tables and equivalent fractions while playing Number Munchers. Games like Sonic The Hedgehog taught me problem solving skills and persistence. Sports and fighting games like EA NHL and Madden series help me learn things like how plays in football and hockey are designed, the names and stats of all the players in the league, and the need to find your opponents tenancies whether you are facing the computer or a friend in order to adjust strategy and win. War games like Commander and Conquerer taught me management skills like allocating money and assists for a specific task. You get the idea.
